Thursday, December 20, 2012

Nobody has ever
accused Skeleton Crew Quarterly’s Top 20 Albums list of being a deduction in
populist opinion. But as five years of scouring the ever-changing landscape of
indie music’s expanses can attest to, these year-end proceedings have certainly
distanced themselves from the top-tier names one might expect. That is, if
anyone has any idea of what to expect anymore. How does one measure fame when buzz-bands fall in and out of favour so rapidly? How does one express
loyalty when we’re constantly on the fringe of something new, something else?
Five years ago I worried about sharing too many favourite album picks with the
likes of Pitchfork; now that’s just a funny memory.

I can’t condemn the
accelerated accessibility of new music nowadays, especially since many of the
artists who appear on this year’s list were introduced via
that perpetual online frenzy. Still the virtue of loyalty plays just as
significant a role in this year’s decisions – not intentionally, just as
matters of talent insisted. Included are bands I’d pretty much closed chapters
on, albums I'd never planned on listening to and, in one instance, a
recreation of music that was written nearly 300 years ago! Unlike some of my
colleagues’ exclamations, I don’t personally think 2012 was an exceptional year
in music. But it was a great year, like the rest.

With the utmost
pleasure, I present Skeleton Crew Quarterly’s Top Twenty Albums of 2012. Enjoy
and Happy New Year!

While this
note-by-note rewriting of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons likely won’t unearth throes of
listeners wondering about Vivaldi – you know a score is already ingrained in
Western culture when about half of the rich villains in action movies have
hired a tuxedo-dressed quartet to perform it – but this disc should shed fresh
light on ambient-storyteller Max Richter. Like modern day Vivaldi lovers,
Richter’s following is quietly dedicated and sure to notice how his interpretation invokes the same emotional clairvoyance that adorns his post-classical catalog. Although
any surfacing revelations should be accredited more to Vivaldi than to Richter,
this terse reworking finds The Four Seasons’ beauty feeling sharper and more
resplendent than ever.

In 2009 Mike Silver
wouldn’t have been a wise candidate for keeping electronic music firmly in its
shoes. His debut Continent had engorged itself with a taste of everything the
electronic music scene brought to the buffet, espousing chillwave, downtempo,
IDM, the lot. This year’s Exercises EP not only matches the Mike Silver I’ve
seen spinning, diligently reserved, in the trendier lounges of Montreal, it
inverts CFCF’s adventurousness from of-the-moment chic to 70s futurism with a
post-classical bent. It feels truer to electronic music's past without getting trapped in the kitsch.

What makes this
newfound dry approach work is how Silver’s electronics and piano work never
fully enmesh; the old-school analogs coinciding with his traditional
compositions the way vines curl around woodwork. Complimenting the record cover,
Exercises EP finds two different scales fleshing out an architecture hollow but
reliable, small in stature but deeply impressionable.

No electronic music
fan worth his or her salt can deny the distinction between a dance album and a
dance epic. One’s a collection of individual cuts, organized to fulfill the
artist-in-question’s style; the other utilizes those style principles as a
foundation for something grander – an imagined landscape populated with sonic
intricacies that seek to transport your mind as well as move your muscles.

Given the string of
singles John Talabot has teased over the course of some four years, the
likelihood that the long-awaited fin would land in the latter
category is surprising, especially because those singles appear here as if
originally written to be part of fin’s evocative, Heart Of Darkness-like journey.
Talabot doesn’t just find a rare kinetic balance on tracks like “Depak Ine” and
“Oro Y Sangre” but a complete state of being, transmitted from some dense
jungle south of Ibiza’s lush coastline. Even in the headiest moments of
club-thumpers “Last Land” and “So Will Be Now…”, we’re never in a poorly-lit
club; we’re weightless in the mindspace of Talabot’s creepy, masked fancy.

As a band renowned
for a ragged brand of garage-y psychedelia, it’s funny that Long Slow Dance’s
best attribute is its light touch. Surrounding the odd riff-heavy chasm of
“Euphoria” we find classic pop songs swooning in details: “Foolish Person”
dabbed in sweet echo, “Dream Girls” decorated with some island marimbas and
death-slow surf guitar laced throughout the title track. Given the instrumental
wares working to compliment Tim Cohen’s poignant lyrics, the album’s
highlights – “Executioner’s Song”, “Fire Alarm” – have the chops to haunt just
about any competing rock tune this year.

Music critics are so
engaged with peering into the artistic realm that it’s funny when artists
appear to be gazing back. Lord knows what Matthew Dear has been reading
of his own press but something must be said of Ghostly’s promotional video for
Beams, which seems to harness only the most grandiose of associations with the electronic pop artist. While Dear sits in a NYC
loft like an emotionless icon, various artists surround him: a poet reads aloud, a
trumpeter plays, an interpretive dancer performs and Ghostly
artist Michael Cina paints a portrait of him.

The implicitly
highbrow aspirations aren’t the problem; it’s just that Beams doesn’t cater to
any of that daring. Instead of leaping into unsure waters, these eleven
tracks boast Dear’s assuredness as a producer of immaculate, off-kilter pop and
a singer of creative means. The scale of “Her Fantasy” is devastating in the
realm of electronic pop, and hooks formed out of Dear’s bizarre, multilayered
phrasings strike repeated sweet-spots in “Fighting Is Futile”, “Ahead Of Myself”, and
“Temptation”. Less ambitious than the claustrophobic Black City and all the better for it, Beams lacks a grab-me guise to present itself under. But boring as it may sound
without the trumpets and dancers, this is the sound of Dear’s open loft; lots
of light, space and consistency. That, in and of itself, presents a lovely change of pace.

Every year-end list deserves a devious curveball. Against most readers’ wishes,
Skeleton Crew Quarterly has indulged in a few jazz oriented posts over the last
two years – a show review here, an editorial there. But Benedikt Jahnel Trio’s
stunning Equilibrium has the distinction of being not only the first
straight-up jazz disc to factor into SCQ’s year-end festivities but a sure-fire
sign of vitality for ECM records.

A longstanding
measure of artistic quality and sonic mastery, ECM has nevertheless aged alongside
its top exports. With the exception of John Surman’s electronic-assisted
Saltash Bells, the label’s recent output (by big names like John Abercrombie and Eberhard Weber) has consisted of conservative balladry or high-brow minimalism,
suggesting that revolutionary statement-records had indeed become part of the past. Equilibrium
isn’t rewriting jazz genetics but pianist Jahnel and his trio have bolstered
ECM’s renowned knack for beauty with a bucolic sense of momentum. Percussionist Owen Howard evokes Jack DeJohnette's wide plateau for the piano and bass to
intermingle on the relaxed drive of “Wrangel” and the serendipitously reflective
“Sacred Silence”. At thirteen minutes “Moorland and High Land” proffers where
Equilibrium might’ve toppled over but, instead of meandering in some elitist
wilderness, the trio abides a disciplined, snaky narrative that rises from
free-form disquiet to a thriving, unified whole. It’s undoubtedly motivated
foremost by piano but as the closing moments of the title track illustrate, no
heart can resist the right touch of ivories. A spirited ray of light from
one of jazz’s very best imprints.

“Lost In the Light”,
handily one of the best tracks I’ve heard all year, recently placed prominently
in a commercial for a jewelry company. I get that it’s a payday and I’m happy Afie
Jurvanen’s had a successful year. Still, there are ample instances on Barchords
that suggest an artist developing head and shoulders above today’s indie rites
of passage. Much like “Lost In the Light”, tracks like “Never Again”, “Be My
Witness” and “Time and Time Again” carry an air of timelessness, behaving more
like statements of intent than something construable as an advertisement
jingle.

Wait – I’ve been full-on
ignoring Stars for something like six years. So how did this come about? (1)
“The Theory Of Relativity”, a super-tight disco-groove of an opening track that
convinced me to purchase the CD - again... - for my wife. (2) The glossy veneer and
explosive sentimentality of single “Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When
You Give It”, calling to mind the band’s previous high watermark Set Yourself
On Fire. (3) A series of atmospheric rockers (“Backlines”, “Through the Mines”,
“A Song Is a Weapon”) that over routine drives through the city kept the disc
firmly in our car stereo. And (4) lovesick deep cuts (“The Loose Ends Will Make
Knots”, “The 400”) that resound as if playing through a neighbour’s wall,
making plain the case that The North is the most assured and fulfilling Stars
record since most casual fans stopped caring. As a former member of that
group, I can attest: now’s a great time to get reacquainted.

My name’s Ryan and I’m
a Hot Chip fan. Well that wasn’t so hard. But somehow, despite buying every
record of theirs since 2006’s breakthrough The Warning – all of them under the
cover of being for my wife, it should be noted – I’ve maintained a distance
between the band’s infectious tracks and any bits of admiration I might've offered in return. Even after their brand of electro-pop, instantly catchy but often
lacking the teeth to leave a full imprint, reached an impasse with 2010’s patchy-at-best
One Life Stand, I somehow stuck it out for one more round.

This summer’s In Our
Heads provided the TKO I forgot the British five-piece was capable of, and
asserted that any long-sought, daydream Hot Chip record I wordlessly followed them for
was no mere fantasy. “Motion Sickness” might just be the finest opener of the
year, an emotive roll of the dice that consolidates all of the band’s well-known
schizophrenic impulses, and subsequent tracks (“Don’t Deny Your Heart”, “Night
and Day”) flesh out a funk-addled love-in of nerdy studio grooves and razor-sharp
arrangements. It’s still very much a Hot Chip record, but the top-notch Hot
Chip we’ve only heard in fits and spurts over the last few releases. If you’ve
been on the fence throughout it all, In Our Heads might be your record to come
clean to as well.

When Lux was billed
as Brian Eno’s “first solo album on Warp Records”, I admittedly arced an
eyebrow. It read as though the label was in some way subverting any deflated expectations
brought about by 2010’s soundtrack to that shitty Peter Jackson movieSmall Craft On a Milk Sea and the pair of Rick Holland accompanied
releases, Drums Between the Bells and Panic Of Looking.

But maybe Warp
weren’t dealing in semantics, because Lux sounds precisely like Eno’s first
solo album in quite some time, a refreshingly ambient procedure that stands
proudly in the shadow of Music For Airports and several other top-notch entries
in Eno’s ambient/installation series. Beautiful, evasive, monotonous and with
the rare capacity – found among other sterile ambient albums – to elicit
foreign emotions out of thin air, Lux maintains that Eno can focus as
thoroughly as he can muck about with friends. Long live the Godfather of
Ambience.

There are so many
ways one could deepen the purpose of Mixed Emotions but it’s unnecessary. Here's a record culturally of-the-moment but in the shadow of no contemporaries, entirely
retro-inspired but committed to meticulously. 2012’s whored-out haze has been
scrapped, the 80s-aping dismissed for Tanlines’ truly unabashed pop, the sort five-year-olds can understand almost as fully as grown adults. Songs about
love, distance, communication and longing utilizing pitch-perfect doses of
discord (“Green Grass”), harmonics (“Abby”), the odd dose of afro-rhythm (“Real Life”) and a sense
of melody occupying every write-it-on-the-wall chorus. It sounds simple because
it is; the direct nature of Mixed Emotions supersedes trend and scene for the
heart, and it’s pretty much a bulls-eye.

While Shigeto rivals
some of Ghostly International’s lead exports in terms of sheer output, the
moniker for Zach Saginaw has yet to achieve as much recognition. Released in
the bleak beginnings of January, Lineage looked to upgrade that reputation with
a sterling mix of nu-jazz rhythms, R&B harmonies and euphoric beat-splicing.
Nearly twelve months on, Shigeto remains something of an underappreciated
workhorse for the label.

But, true to form,
Lineage proved that little train that could in the life-cycle of Skeleton Crew
Quarterly, surviving periods of neglect over the course of the year only to
bounce back more resilient and purposeful than ever. At first a smooth
selection of grooves to watch snowfall from one’s balcony, tracks like
“Soaring” and “Huron River Drive” ushered in the jazzy, brain-candy brilliance
of triptychs “A Child’s Mind” and “Field Trip”. As long as Saginaw can continue
usurping expectations a few thousand people at a time, Shigeto’s on his way to
building a formidable catalog.

There’s a reason the
shanty-house manning the cover of GY!BE’s first studio record in ten years has
the mystique of a portal. These four cuts – two expansively detailed guitar
workouts and two experimental blurs – return post-rock to its earthly pleasures,
where friction and abrasiveness make a journey of the joys and sorrows so
exploited in indie-rock these days. Much like, say, chill-wave’s canned
euphoria, post-rock has been rightly accused of abiding by a predictable code.
And although the group’s long-awaited return features tracks they’d been
performing live way back in 2003, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have reinvigorated the genre’s waning trademarks. The slow build of "Mladic" erupts in a way nobody could’ve
anticipated. “We Drift Like Worried Fire” snakes
its way through a classical body, finding beauty within savagery and vice
versa. And, for the life of me, I still can’t pull much from muddied ambient
tracks "Their Helicopters Sing" and "Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable"; they’re unofficial comedown epilogues to preceding epics
that leave me as speechless as Godspeed have ever left me.